Cryptocurrency valuations are raising the roof on the world\'s markets at the beginning of 2018, with their total market cap achieving an astronomical all-time high of more than $800bn – and looks set to make $800bn if trends continue. Records are being made and broken with previously unheard of rapidity: the last record high for the overall market capitalization was $654bn on December 21st last year.

The majority of this growth is down to a greatly increased interest in altcoins, while Bitcoin itself (BTC) has been losing both popularity and value recently. This is in spite of a price spike in mid-December when it opened for trading on the Chicago futures markets and had a brief rise to over $20,000. BTC value sank back as low as $11,833 just before Christmas, although it has rallied since then. A big boost came for BTC on January 2nd, when a major investment into Bitcoin was announced in the Wall Street Journal, on behalf of San Francisco\'s Founders Fund, a venture capital firm headed up by investor Peter Thiel.

Bitcoin has now lost its overall dominance of the cryptocurrency rankings, following huge price increases by other altcoins, particularly Ripple. The XRP coin has overtaken Ether to take second place in overall market cap value, as a result of trading increases in South Korea.